The centrepiece of the Barbican's Olympic arts festival opens to the public this week. Tom Jeffreys reviews Bauhaus - Art as Life.
Not content with a 108% rise in Arts Council funding, announced last year with the expressed purpose of “allowing it to work across all the Olympic boroughs”, the Barbican Centre also received, according to the Guardian, a special grant of some £700,000 from the London Olympic organisers in order simply to take part in the Cultural Olympiad. So it's certainly interesting that when the eyes of the world are on London and the city's creative industries, the Barbican (predominantly funded by the City of London Corporation) has decided to eschew local talent in favour of an exhibition dedicated to an early twentieth century German design school.
Admittedly, it is the Bauhaus. One of the major driving forces behind the aesthetics of Modernism, the influence of this small group continues right up to the present day, not least in the form of the Barbican itself, whose particular brand of Brutalism may be seen to trace its origins to the rigorously geometric asymmetry of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe et al.
As the press release proudly states, this is the biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over 40 years, and it's also the first time that this country has hosted a show that brings together artefacts from the three major Bauhaus collections – the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Weimar Classics Foundation. The result is a monster of a show, with over 400 works including painting, photography, architecture, photography, furniture design, teapots, toys, textiles and fashion.
Thankfully, though, this embarrassment of riches – that includes works by the likes of Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy – is rendered manageable by a combination of sensible curation and elegant exhibition design courtesy of Carmody Groarke and A Practice for Everyday Life. The decision, for example, to opt for a straightforward chronological approach is a sound one, as it allows for subtle contextualisation as well as an appreciation of the development of the school.
Founded by Gropius in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus was initially extremely craft-orientated, with a surprisingly traditional, practice-led underpinning and penchant for the primitive (and the wackily superstitious). This moved quickly towards the geometry and primary colours which we all know and love. What this exhibition does extremely well is to tie these developments to individual people and specific moments. So the importance of toys is tied to Klee and Lyonel Feininger playing with their own children; the move away from primitivism is attributed in part to Theo van Doesburg's arrival in Weimar in 1922; the emergence of product design stems from financial pressure exerted by the Thuringian state government in 1923; and the school's closure in 1933 is, of course, strongly linked to the rise of National Socialism.
For fans of the Bauhaus aesthetic (typology geeks, graphic designers and architects in particular) this is a quite wonderful show – packed with all manner of incredible pieces. Highlights for me include Josef Hartwig's minimal limewood chess set; Marianne Brandt's spherical silver tea infuser; Gropius and Meyer's entry for the Chicago Tribute Tower; and a strange little film piece entitled A Lightplay Black White Grey by the rather brilliant Moholy-Nagy.
But after while, it all just begins to seem a bit silly. Modernism's prescriptive macho hubris would seem hilarious, were the consequences not so devastating. It's summed up by Kandinsky's ludicrous colour-theory classes, as well as by Gropius speaking of the desire to forge “the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith”.
World War Two put paid to all that, but in truth this grandiose fusion of Symbolism and Scientism, Romanticism, Marxism and a kind of cod religion was always already flawed. No wonder Postmodernism turned it all into a big joke. The question now is: what next? If the Barbican's exhibition can tangentially begin to help us address that, then perhaps all that Olympic money will have been well spent after all. Legacy? We shall see.
Bauhaus - Art as Life is at the Barbican from 3rd May to 12th August 2012.
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